CLIMATE: Lawmakers to ponder U.S. aid commitments without cap-and-trade revenue

With prospects for a broad climate bill nearly dead this year, a House Foreign Affairs subpanel will meet tomorrow to probe how the United States can honor its climate finance commitments to the developing world without cap-and-trade revenue…

The world’s wealthy nations, including the United States, have pledged to raise $100 billion a year by 2020 for climate aid to low-emitting impoverished countries that, through one of climate change’s cruelest twists, are among the most vulnerable to the drought and floods that will accompany global warming.

That pledge, which includes $30 billion in quick-start funding over the next three years, was one of the most tangible successes of last December’s U.N. climate summit. The deal was critical in winning over many developing nations to sign onto the Copenhagen Accord, sparing the United Nations and President Obama a total fiasco in Denmark.

However, how this money will be raised remains very much in doubt in the United States, especially with the failure this year of comprehensive climate legislation. Both the House’s Waxman-Markey bill and the Senate’s Kerry-Lieberman bill shunted portions of their cap-and-trade revenue toward international climate aid.

Without this money, it will be extremely difficult to raise significant climate funds, wrote Michael Levi, senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations, on his blog.

“Raising [the funds] without cap-and-trade will almost certainly be impossible,” he wrote. “If others conclude from the current debacle that cap-and-trade is permanently dead in the United States, Washington will be in for a rough ride at the climate talks in Cancun in December.”

Oh. Well. We wouldn’t want that. If we can avoid people being mean to the State Department because those stingy American taxpayers won’t give them enough money, we should, at (apparently) all costs.

But, still… is it unfair to ask whether causing our “electricity rates [to] necessarily skyrocket” is enough, given how this will send tens of thousands or more jobs overseas? Or, was President Obama lying when he said that was his goal, along with “bankrupt[ing]” politically (Rather, ideologically) disfavored industries and “rais[ing] billions of dollars” (wow…lots of billions) to underwrite his social experimentation?

Anyway, there doesn’t seem to be much reason for China, Mexico, and State Department negotiators eager for their December Cancun junket to worry. John Kerry has the solution. Once they’re no longer accountable to the voters — but more concerned about securing the ambassadorship to Bermuda, etc. — they’ll feel more liberated to steal your freedoms and bankrupt America.